As a developer Garry embodies the spirit of the passionate autodidact.
He is always searching for the best technology for a given problem yet
manages never to lose sight of the importance of delivery and
maintainability.

He prides himself on his willingness to listen, depth of understanding,
breadth of experience, speed of response and quality of production.

Below is a brief summary of his professional evolution, from
enthusiastic hobbyist to professional full-stack developer with nearly
30 years experience.

2008-present

Director, Magnetised

Currently in development is an open-source multi-room audio system
powered by Raspberry Pis, Elixir, Elm and the Nerves embedded software platform.

ElixirElmPortaudioHTML5WebpackBuildroot

Can Upload

A fault-tolerant, distributed, scalable, resumable-upload system
written in Go, heavily utilising NSQ message queues and deployed using Ansible.

GoAnsibleS3SQSEC2

Opendesk

For the last couple of years I've also been lucky enough to be
involved as a senior developer with Opendesk, helping them to
achieve their aim of revolutionising manufacturing. My
responsibilities have been user interface/experience design and
helping to re-develop the main company website (and associated projects) using
Spontaneous.

Fieldnotes Communities

Spontaneous CMS

Spontaneous CMS is a
powerful yet intuitive CMS framework developed exclusively by
Magnetised. Spontaneous is built using Ruby and leverages a powerful form of
single table inheritance to map data onto content types that define
custom fields and behaviours.

RubyS3jQueryHTML5MySQLPostgreSQL

The latest, open
source, version of Spontaneous powers the following websites:

Opendesk. Opendesk is a global
platform for local making. You can use it to download, make and buy
work space furniture.

OpenMaking.is a public domain
resource developing open standards in keeping with new and social
forms of design and manufacturing.

Kitmonsters. Kitmonsters
features in-depth interviews with musicians about their craft and
their kit. It brings you exclusive videos, tips, exciting new music
tech, and competitions - we talk to new bands, rising stars, gurus
and producers. It is a collaboration between magnetised and Terry Tyldesley.

Albert. The home of environmental sustainability for the UK screen arts. Designed and developed by Magnetised for BAFTA

Soda. Mashing up the physical and digital worlds for culture and learning. Designed & developed by Magnetised.

Carbon Visuals

Carbon Visuals was startup dedicated to communicating the realities of global warming through concrete visualisation. Many projects required pushing the boundaries of web technology of the time, for example this embeddable widget required porting the modelling code from OpenGL to Javascript for rendering 3D objects into an HTML5 Canvas element.

As web technology progressed and WebGL became more widely available we were able to utilise Three.js to provide real-time3D visualisations.

CanvasThree.jsHTML5

2006-2007

Technical Director, Designjunction

Managing a small-but-growing design shop based on the technology
behind Spontaneous and beautiful design.

Design Museum Shop

Our largest project was a re-launch of the Design
Museum Shop which a custom e-commerce solution built on top of
Spontaneous CMS, which resulted in a beautiful and fast-loading
e-commerce site.

SpontaneousjQueryHTMLMySQL

Dezeen

2002-2005

Freelance, Buenos Aires, Argentina

Living and working in Buenos Aires, Argentina. Learning Spanish,
making cocktails, writing travel guides.
Developing a crazy pet-project based on simulated leaf-cutter ants
eating a virtual internet and making poetry...

Also, freelance web-development including:

Design Museum

Irrepressible

irrepressible.info.
Part of a campaign combating online censorship by Amnesty
International. Developed in Python using Turbo Gears v1 and including
a ‘fragment’ publishing system based on pre-rendered snippets
randomly selected using a small JavaScript library embedded into
external sites. This site survived a slash-dotting.

TurboGearsJavascriptHTMLMySQL

D&AD

A bespoke CMS system for managing the D&AD
website. Programmed in Perl and XSLT it was fairly eccentric
but taught me a lot about the power of code generation.

1997-1999

Junior Developer, RED56

Responsible for a diverse range of technologies and clients,
including desktop publishing in QuarkXPress, installation and
administration of a company email/dev server based on yggdrasil
linux and large amounts of hand-crafted
HTML.

LinuxPerl5JavaHTML4

AudioROM ‘ShiftControl’

Working with the AudioROM art collective, I was responsible for the PC port of the interactive music CD-ROM ‘ShiftControl’.

Passing Phases

During this period I also collaborated with choreographer Sarah Rubidge and
composer Nye Parry on an
interactive artwork called Passing
Phases which was exhibited in the Queen Elizabeth Hall and at
IDAT 99, Arizona.

JavaDirector

1995

Postgraduate, Queen Mary University of London

Initial work on an (abandoned) doctorate in plasma physics
simulating & visualising perturbations of magnetic fields.
Publishing a personal page on the University's servers in HTML2.

CHTML2

1991-1994

Undergraduate, University College London

B.Sc. (Hons) in Astronomy and Physics (1st class).

Third year project investigating the possible heating effect of choronal magnetic field entanglement using Braid Theory and C.

C

1990

Programs for the Acorn Archimedes A3000 published in Acorn User magazine. These were BASIC programs with high performance sections written in ARM RISC assembly language.